NY group cancels 2016 music festival founded by Pete Seeger

Associated Press

BEACON, N.Y. (AP) — The annual Hudson Valley music festival that folk singer Pete Seeger staged for decades has been canceled this year because of financial difficulties, the environmental conservation group that hosts the event said Thursday.

The board of directors for the Beacon-based Hudson River Sloop Clearwater organization decided during a meeting Wednesday night to cancel the two-day event scheduled for June 18-19.

The fundraising concerts Seeger started in the 1970s have been held since the late 1990s at a riverside park in Westchester County. Seeger died two years ago this month at age 94.

Clearwater Executive Director Peter Gross said the group can't risk money on a festival, which earned just $31,000 in 2015 after posting an average net income of $162,000 over the last six years, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal. The festival is expected to return in 2017, he said.

Seeger helped launch the vessel Clearwater in 1969. A 106-foot replica of the vessels that sailed the Hudson River in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Clearwater serves as a floating classroom for environmental causes along the Hudson.

The vessel is currently undergoing an $850,000 restoration at its homeport in Kingston, New York.

"All of our efforts are going toward the sloop right now," Annie Osborn, Clearwater's board president, said in a statement released Thursday. She called the vessel "the heart and soul of our organization."

Instead of a two-day music festival featuring dozens of acts, Clearwater officials are planning a series of smaller concerts in the Hudson Valley through 2016, with the first scheduled for Sunday in Rosendale, headlined by blues guitarist Guy Davis.

Over the years, acts such as David Crosby, Los Lobos, Lucinda Williams, Norah Jones and the Mavericks performed at the Great Hudson River Revival, which made its debut in 1978 at a park in Croton-on-Hudson. The venue changed in the late 1980s, then returned to Croton Point Park in 1999.